End the All-Volunteer Force

[Rose]

Resuming conscription is the best way to reconnect the people with the armed services. Yes, reestablishing a draft, with all its Vietnam-era connotations, would cause problems for the military, but those could never be as painful and expensive as fighting an unnecessary war in Iraq for almost nine years. A draft would be good for our nation and ultimately for our military

I was basically raised by a Marine Officer who was nominated for the Medal of Honor (amongst other medals) for saving his entire platoon and who has been gone since 2009. He never talked about the war until I told him I was thinking about ROTC in college (in 07). After listening to what he told me about, what he had to do just to keep his men alive, I was speechless. I could have never imagined what he had to do and that he could have lived with that especially with the way he was treated once he returned home. He didn't have a choice about joining yet he did it. When he came back, he was treated like he was Hitler incarnate by his fellow citizens who he fought for.

He wanted me to go in of my own accord, and with my eyes open to what I could face. What I remember most is the hurt and betrayal that he still felt after all those years from those protestors; the pain of having a man in his unit who didn't want to be there commit suicide; having to deal with drug addicts who you couldn't trust to protect your back. I'm sorry, but I've heard stories like his way to many times since then to think that an enlisted force would be better than the AVF we have now.

I know his experience and that of others are just anecdotal, but from everything I've read on it, it seems to sadly have been been the norm for tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of service men. I think Mr. Ricks should seriously reconsider that idea.

[JMA]

I think your man, Ricks, is trying to meet his quota of words published...

If his belief is that if you have a substandard conscript army then the politicians would be more wary of committing to war then he may have a point. Then again the avoidance of military humiliation does not seem to factor into the thinking of US politicians - think Vietnam, Lebanon, Somalia, Afghanistan - to illustrate my point.

I have repeated many times that in the military it takes 15-20 years of commissioned service for an officer to reach the rank of Lt Col and command a battalion of 600 plus men. Yet there is no barrier (in terms of qualifications and experience) to become President of the US. The same with the various Secretaries and congressmen. This is probably the (main) source of America's problems.

When it comes to protecting the nation I go with the sentiments of George Orwell:

"We sleep safely in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm."

Now in order to achieve this first line of 'protection' we need to select the type of 'rough men' who will do their duty when called upon to do so... and not cobble together a force to reflect the composition of the nation and to hell with their competence as warriors... and to act as a brake on the whims of politicians.

Rather than avoiding (mostly small) wars because of the (almost) certainty of failure is it not more intelligent to have troops that are up to the task and use them more judiciously?

Conscription is or should be the last resort for a threatened nation.

[Fuchs]

It was already pointed out that the 1% stems almost entirely from the size of the occupation forces and their rotation, not from the volunteer system. This is the case-specific nonsense of Ricks.



Now the general nonsense, and I'll use the economic science toolbox to explain it:


When we spend money, we do so to motivate someone else to do something he or she would otherwise not do. Give me a haircut, allow me to leave the shop with the TV set, pay me money when my flat burned out. The amount of money needed is roughly proportional to the amount of motivation required. That's why in some countries you pay less if you bribe.

Price ~ motivation required

Now if you want a volunteer, you pay him the appropriate price for his motivation. That's fair, that's voluntary. No power advantage is used to coerce (except stop-loss etc).

If you hire a conscript, you don't need to pay him the appropriate price. instead, you can use a mix of inappropriately low price and power advantage, for coercion. This is the part about the loss of freedom through conscription.

There's also a major inefficiency involved that proves that conscription is inferior for the country in comparison to a volunteer force, at the very least until sovereignty is really at stake:
Whom do you get if you have a volunteer force? Most like the (able and) most easily motivated ones. It's like a reverse auction. You offer a price and the ones hired most easily agree, you raise and some more agree etc. In the end, you pay the marginal rate price - the price needed to motivate the last needed (wo)man. This means some are paid more than necessary to motivate them, but this waste stays in the society and doesn't account as harm done - it's just a transfer.
Compare this to conscription: You just grab some, and coerce whoever of that group is not motivated by the money. This does not include any mechanism for recruiting the most easily motivated ones. The amount of motivation based on coercion accounts for as harm done to the own society.
Even if you consider coercion + price as the sum of all mil personnel costs to society, you're still bound to arrive at the conclusion that conscription is more expensive to the society (because the volunteer system applies a technique to recruit the 'cheapest' personnel).


In short: Conscription is inferior to a volunteer force regarding general welfare


I found that most pro-conscription people are closet authoritarians, the kind of people that actually dislikes freedom and choice, no matter what they say.